Abstract: The article is devoted to the description and opposition of culturological approaches to the perception and analysis of visual culture phenomena based either on "reading" the visual as a text, or on a special experience of its "visibility", fundamentally different from the experience of "reading" (which is designated in the article as a "desemiotic" approach). The first approach is implemented within the framework of semiotics, where the visual is really considered as a text, a system of signs, or even a language that can be analyzed through interpretation, search and isolation of meaning. The second approach arises under the influence of post-structuralist criticism of semiotics, interest in what is "hidden behind structures" and does not lend itself to semiotic reading: the visual is considered here as a special affecting experience that escapes from a fixed meaning. To analyze, disclose and contrast the selected cultural approaches, the article uses a comparative typological method. The main theoretical aspects of the semiotic approach to the analysis of the visual based on the work of R. Barthes "Rhetoric of the image", as well as the directions based on this methodology: visual semiotics and visual rhetoric are considered. A brief description of the "desemiotic" approach is given: the difference between visual and language and text is asserted, the semiotic approach is criticized for its limitations and some incompleteness. The focus of attention shifts to a different, direct, sensual, affective perception of the visual, or to the range of social effects that it produces: its cultural and political functions, the ability to be a cultural representation, to construct relationships with the perceiving subject. The approach is presented on the example of the works of such researchers as W. Mitchell, J. Elkins, H. U. Humbrecht, N. Mirzoeff, I. Rogoff.